


It Took A Bomb (to see things differently)

by AngeNoir



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Government Task Force, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Corruption, Future Fic, Getting Back Together, Government Agencies, Government Conspiracy, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Trust, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 06:24:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14665176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: Tony never expected Steve Rogers to come back into his life. After a very,veryexplosive and public break-up, Steve left, and it felt like he took the team with him. It was hard for Tony to lead it, and still look for the corruption Steve said was present.And then there was the bomb.And things went into motion a hell of a lot more quickly than Tony was expecting.





	It Took A Bomb (to see things differently)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [It Took A Bomb](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/381234) by r-kun. 



 

“You look ridiculous, by the way.”

Tony didn’t bother to grace Steve with a glance. “Did you or did you not find out where we’re going?” he asked.

Steve craned his neck to look up at Tony, who was squatting on the hood of their beat-up, broken-down, old-as-balls army truck. It was an old enough model that it didn’t have the standard tracking equipment, and it still ran on fossil fuels, for fucks sake. “What are you even doing up there?” Steve asked, unfolding the map and shaking it open. “You, what, sunbathing up on that hood?”

“Would you cut it out? If you have nothing interesting to say, then—”

“Alright, alright,” Steve grumbled under his breath, and Tony would feel more remorse if he wasn’t hot, out of materials to fix this outdated automobile, and wasn’t terrified about what happened to his team.

As it was, he hunched down – the desert was making the hood of the car (a _metal_ compound; old cars were so _inefficient_ ) unbearably hot, and he was up on the hood, had been for a while, trying to figure out how to reroute the power from the sun into the engine with no luck – and so awkwardly bent over to try and look at the wrinkled and faded paper clutched in Steve’s hands. “That’s an old map, Steve,” he said slowly. “What – I don’t even know if that has the correct distances, or even landmarks.”

“It’s serviceable enough. We just need a general direction to make it to the headquarters of SHIELD, at least here on the West Coast,” Steve said calmly. “We know where the headquarters are – we just need to get across the Mojave, since Fury had moved the servers and the technical headquarters of SHIELD to Phoenix. Once there, we’ll simply infiltrate the headquarters and find proof of the corruption that I _warned_ you about.”

Simple. Tony shook his head, and closed his eyes, pulling a piece of oil-stained cloth from his pocket and wiping his face quickly before resting his hand on his knee. He didn’t want to think about the fact that his team had been scattered to the winds – sent here and there on assignments that he assigned himself, hoping to get them out of the San Jose offices, because he knew something was coming, and he wasn’t sure he could protect them. He didn’t want to think about sitting at his desk in San Jose, neck deep in financial reports and trying to trace back the tiny inconsistencies that seemed to have no real origin, when there was a muffled roar, and then heat – and then Steve motherfucking Rogers was fucking carrying him like a damsel in distress, taking him into the backseat of some sort of vehicle, but before he could really ask any real questions, he must have passed out.

He didn’t know where any of them were, now. Not with the headquarters blown up, not with what he suspected (but had _no proof_ , he had _no proof_ ) and how that could track down his team. Especially once his team found out about the explosion, and came looking for him – they’d be walking into a trap, most likely.

Unless they didn’t come looking for him. He didn’t exactly inspire closeness and warm feelings the way Steve had once inspired.

“Hey.”

Tony turned his head, meeting Steve’s blue, blue eyes, brought back to his body and pulled out of his memories by the gentle nudge Steve had pressed against Tony’s thigh with his massive shoulder.

“Wherever you’re going – don’t. We’re going to keep them safe. I managed to get ahold of Natasha and sent her a warning, told her to try and warn the others.”

Tony did his best not to react to that. When Steve had left – when Steve had just fucking _left_ , just _abandoned_ Tony instead of working their shit out – when Steve had left, Tony was left in charge of the team. They hadn’t really been happy with Tony – Tony had been the ideas guy, the guy who backed Steve’s plan up when they were good and argued with Steve until a bad plan changed for the better. He was the one who would reach out and do more, come up with new armor, new weapons, and he was the person who headed the cybersecurity division. The team knew he was not the person who originally made the plans, and though he had tried to step up, especially since he had been co-commander with Steve before, he knew the team hadn’t ever really settled into his presence or his leadership style. He was too abrasive, too generally disliked, too unskilled with basic human interaction and social skills that he knew he had been driving the team to disobey, or go over his head and get him removed.

Again. Unless they _didn’t_ come looking for him.

“Did you fix the power situation with the car?”

Tony jerked himself out of his increasingly dark thoughts, the spiral that too easily sucked him in nowadays, and looked over his shoulder at the car. “I was trying to jury-rig up some of the materials in the trunk to harness the solar energy to jumpstart the engine, but we’re pretty low on any kind of tools that would make it possible. If I had something that could actively connect or uplink, I could run diagnostics—”

“No, nothing that can connect to any kind of network. How do you think they were hiding from you? Whoever is behind all of this is just as good, if not better, than you are at all that technology. You have to stay offline until we figure out where the leak is in the organization. Why do you think I stripped you of your nanotech and the communicators you kept on your person?”

Tony had wondered why all his pieces of tech had disappeared from his pockets and his body, but had simply thought it had something to do with the explosion.

Figures that Steve, the person who often scoffed at how ‘plugged in’ Tony was in the world, would have gotten rid of everything technology-related.

“Well, without my diagnostics and nanotech, there’s not much I can do with this piece of shit.”

“So we’re stuck out here?” Steve asked, frowning. “I thought you were a mechanic.”

Stung – and how _dare_ Steve, who constantly derided Tony and then _left_ , keep on insulting Tony’s abilities? – Tony shifted again and picked at the small components he had been fiddling with. “I said I couldn’t do much, not that I can’t do _anything_. It will just take me an insanely ridiculously long amount of time because none of this is anything near what I should have to convert solar power into something a fossil fuel dinosaur can use, alright?”

Steve pushed himself off the truck, where he’d been leaning, and folded up the map. “Well, worst comes to worse, there’s a gas station an hour’s walk that direction, and we can maybe hotwire a car or something. Still, I would like to keep this car. It doesn’t have any uplink at all to World-Net, which means our movements are untraceable so long as we’re in this thing and paying with credits, not e-trade.”

Tony gaped at Steve. In their interconnected world, Steve’s outlook – _especially_ considering he was _younger_ than Tony – was practically ancient. Tony had thought it adorable before, almost cute, but after their way-less-than-amicable break, being nearly blown up, and on edge about his team, Tony exploded.

“ _Credits_?!” he demanded, shoving himself off the hood of the car – probably a bad move, in hindsight, since Steve had at least three or four inches on him – and getting into Steve’s personal space. “I’m sorry, have you decided to drag us back to the 2000s or some shit? What the hell, Rogers? You don’t trust me to find out whoever the hell it is, you don’t trust me to be able to cover our tracks if we use e-trade, you don’t even trust us to use a half-way decent piece of shit instead of this rumbling dinosaur?!”

“And where did trusting you lead us to, anyway?” Steve roared back. “Your team scattered and you nearly _dead_?!”

Tony’s mouth clicked shut, shame and guild blooming in his chest, and Steve’s face immediately took on a look of regret.

“Tony – Tony, I didn’t mean that—” he began.

Without saying a word, Tony turned on his heel and strode to the front of the car. Slamming his fist on the hood, the ancient engine slowly rumbled to life and sputtered a few times. “It won’t hold,” he said in a flat, dead voice. “If we’re lucky, it’ll last us half an hour. But the connections are jury rigged with fucking shoelaces. Get us to a town.” With that, he crawled into the backseat and curled, back to the front of the car so he could stare at the dull brown cloth-covered seat backs.

Subdued, Steve climbed into the driver’s seat and shifted the car into gear.

 

The car rumbled to a stop, and the jerk pulled Tony out of the memories and recriminations. He heard the door close, and boots walking away. Slowly, he sat upright, trying to ignore the splitting migraine that was pounding behind his eyes, the pain in his lower back, the various cuts and scrapes and burned skin that pulled tight when he moved a certain way.

They were parked at some waystation, something that looked straight out of an old western, those really old, badly over-acted, special-effects-lacking movies that had those open deserts in the background, rusty-white and peeling, old-time gas pumps decaying, signs from a time long-past.

Tony pushed himself up and out of the car, standing up and stretching as best as he could with his various injuries, and glanced at the small building. Steve was standing in there, talking to someone behind the counter, and Tony looked around the small parking lot. There weren’t many cars to choose from, but there was not much of a selection, and certainly no super-old dinosaur model Steve wanted them to use.

Well, it wasn’t as if Steve had shared his plan with Tony. Tony would do what he needed, in order to get them to SHIELD’s blacksite and find the physical evidence necessary that proved there was someone pulling the strings at a higher level.

Sighing, he made his way to the hood of the car, looked at the weak-ass jury-rigged solar panels that had burned out because he hadn’t had the ability to protect the core from overheating. Either those other cars would have the materials he needed to fix their own vehicle, or he’d be able to hotwire the cars. Whichever was the easiest.

He was torso-deep in one of the three other cars in the parking lot, cataloging the parts that he could use – and, to be quite honest, there wasn’t much he could salvage. While none of the other three cars were as old as they one they were in currently, and while the three other cars were almost in as bad shape as the one Steve had picked for their getaway vehicle, there wasn’t much he could use in them that would fix their piece of shit car. Anyway, he was torso-deep in the car when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder.

He jerked upright, narrowly missing banging his head on the hood, and squinted-glared at the person behind him.

Steve Rogers. Figures.

“What are you doing?” Steve asked severely.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Tony huffed. “You wanna make it the next two hundred or so miles to the blacksite, we need something possible to do that. That shitty vehicle you have has given its life in service, give it a break. Let me figure something out that we can use.”

Steve folded his arms and glowered at Tony. “I just finished talking with the owner of the store. He said that there should be mechanical parts in a junkyard fifteen minutes north of here.”

“It. Will not. Get us there,” Tony said, deadpan and as firm as he could be against Steve’s stubbornness and implacable sureness that he was right.

“You managed to pull it off to get us here, you can—”

“It’s not _magic_ , I don’t just _make_ things happen, it is physically impossible for me to get that car a few more miles, we are going to take one of these cars, okay? That’s what we are going to do. I can’t believe you are throwing a fit over this, when aren’t _you_ the person who was pulled into Fury’s office because you and Wilson and Romanoff hotwired a _tank_ in Beirut?!”

For a long moment, Steve met his gaze, furious and belligerent, and then his expression folded, and he dragged a hand down his face. “I just… these people don’t have much.”

“And when we can legitimize our actions, I promise we’ll pay them back – like _always_ ,” Tony growled. “You forget that I was the clean-up and analysis, too.”

Steve looked over the three options and heaved a sigh. “I just – okay. Alright. I just don’t want to – but it’s fine. Let me get our supplies.”

Tony watched him walk back to the car, running a hand over the door. Steve had been gone for a long time – almost a full year, a full year of Tony trying to run the team and track down the leak in their department and keep everyone safe and protect their assets in the field and stay true to their mission… it was a lot, and while Tony had known how much shit he had had to deal with, and had hoped that he wasn’t doing too bad with the team (he was second-best, he knew that, but still, he had hoped that the team thought he was doing okay…) it couldn’t have been easy for Steve, either.

Steve had always seemed to be a company man, someone who had moved from SpecOps into the specialized unit created and maintained as a joint effort between the army and CIA to track down threats, both cybersecurity ones and physical ones. He had been recruited by Fury, as had most of the team, to be quite honest. Fury had also come from the army – in fact, it was really only Tony, his best friend Rhodey, their young hacker, codename Vision, and Banner that had come from the CIA and were in charge of the cybersecurity aspect, as well as the analysis of any data the team came across during their missions. But Steve, he’d been the inspiration, the army guy that wouldn’t ever give up, wouldn’t ever surrender. It was Steve everyone followed unquestionably and trusted unequivocally. Even when Tony would give suggestions, or corrections, to Steve’s plans of attack and mission briefing, he would respect Steve’s knowledge. Normally, Steve didn’t have any problem doing what needed to be done to get the mission complete, but perhaps the year without the team had changed Steve – or made him more hesitant to simply commandeer a vehicle the way he had once done.

In any case, Tony couldn’t fix their car, not without severely sabotaging all three cars, or gutting just one car. It would be simpler to take one and go, and hope that there was no secondary tracking system the way that some models had in the old days.

He pulled himself out of the car and growled. He hadn’t had the amount of time he wanted, but he knew that he’d prefer this car than the other two – more of a charge, less likely to break down, and, most importantly, a functioning air filter and environment stabilizer. “You ready, Steve?” he called out.

Steve looked up from the car and hefted his duffel against his shoulder, juggling the briefcase in his other hand to shove the trunk closed. “Yeah, I’m ready,” he muttered.

“If you really wanna come back for that car, I guarantee it ain’t moving without a tow,” Tony mumbled, for some reason embarrassed and guilty that he was making Steve change cars.

With a huge sigh, Steve blew out his breath and shook his head. “It’s alright. We need to get going, before the others start returning to headquarters. I guarantee it’s a trap to wipe out the team, and the next person who appears is going to end up dead, or worse.”

Tony wondered what Steve meant by ‘worse,’ but considering that at least they had a vehicle that could take them to Phoenix, now, and that they were under a day’s drive from there, he was willing to ignore it and just focus instead on getting the vehicle in their possession. “This isn’t the owner’s car, right?”

Steve looked at it a moment before shaking his head. “He told me he had a black truck, not this… car. Did you pick the worst looking one for a reason?”

“One, it won’t stand out that much, considering all these junkers, and two, it has a functioning environment control system, and I don’t know about you but I’ve had much worse migraines because of the heat than normal.”

“You still getting migraines?” Steve asked, turning to look fully at Tony. “Don’t you have migraine medicine? You had serious migraines before.”

“No, I don’t have medicine, and even if I did, it would have blown up with our headquarters, wouldn’t it have?” Tony snapped. “Just – get in and drive. We might as well go as quickly as we can. We’re on a clock, as you said, and the sooner we find proof and find the people responsible the less likely we have to worry about our teammates walking into a trap, right?”

Steve nodded. “Right, yeah. Let’s go.”

 

“Tony?”

Tony jerked upright – he’d been sitting in the passenger seat, and had apparently fallen asleep, head tilted back, because his neck ached and his mouth felt dry and empty. He looked around and saw Steve looking at him, concerned.

“You were having a nightmare,” Steve offered.

Scrubbing at his face with one hand, trying to marshal his thoughts into some recognizable mess, he shook his head. “I get them sometimes. You know that.”

For a long moment, Steve stared at him, and then he swallowed and looked back out the windshield. “We’re here. How do you want to play this?”

Tony eyed the blacksite. Most likely, there was a chain of command, there was a lieutenant on site in charge, and they would recognize Steve – being the face of their task force wasn’t exactly beneficial in this scenario. There was enough movement that Tony knew that there was full staff on shift, and waiting for the opportune moment would have been best. The safest way of handling this would be staking out the site, understanding their security protocols, figuring out who would notice and who wouldn’t notice, what the routines were.

They were on a time limit. They didn’t really have time for all that.

“Okay, do you trust me?” Tony asked.

 

Tony drove up to the security gate and met the shocked gaze of the security guard. “Tony Stark. You probably know me. Right?”

“You’re – yes, sir. Ah, Agent. Sir. Agent Stark?”

“Yes, yes, you’re very star struck, I got it, look – do you see who I have tied up in the backseat of this crappy piece of shit? Yeah? Look, I just survived an explosion and I’ve been having a very rough – day? Two days? What the hell ever. I am going to need to see the lieutenant on base,” Tony snapped, rapid-fire.

The security guard looked at Steve, “tied up” in the backseat, and then back at Tony. “I – I need some form of identification, sir,” she stammered.

Tony gave her the flattest stare he could muster, and then gestured to his clothes (scorched), his face (scratches barely healed), and the car (the car offended him to his very core; he didn’t need to go over the problems with the car _again_ ). “Does it look like anything survived the explosion? If you need to verify my identity, get one of the scanners here. You know my biometrics are on file; I expect you to be a little quicker than this, if you’re guarding a SHIELD blacksite.”

“Y-yes sir,” the security guard choked out, pale, and she scurried to hail the main base on the communicator in the security booth.

“Is she really supposed to believe _you_ tied _me_ up?” Steve muttered from the back, though his body didn’t move and he continued doing a good impression of a silent and knocked-out prisoner.

“Drugged prisoners can’t talk, Steve,” Tony grunted.

The guard came back with one of the handheld biometric scanners that Tony hated. He submitted gamely enough to the needle prick, retina scan, thumb and index finger printing, and plucking of his hair. After five long and frustrating minutes, she swiped her keycard and input the code that raised the gate.

“Lieutenant Jack Rollins is waiting for you, sir, Agent Stark, sir.”

“Should I not put Steve Rogers into a detention cell?”

“Lieutenant Rollins will be assisting you with the transport of the prisoner, sir,” the security guard said quickly.

Tony humphed and drove forward – no need to roll up the window, now, and his mind raced forward. They were in, but Lieutenant Rollins was a stickler for the rules; he’d notice within minutes that the ropes were not as tight as they could be, and would place Steve in one of the glass cells instead of one that had a lock Steve could pick.

“What are you going to do?” Steve muttered behind him.

“Shut up and let me think,” Tony hissed out, driving down the side road that would bring him straight to the warehouse that processed any terrorists or suspected terrorists that sat here before they were processed out to the max-sec prisons that held enemies of the state.

“Okay, the handcuffs – can you put them on behind your back without too much movement?” he finally said, braking to let a little security convoy pass.

There was silence for a moment, and then Steve said slowly, “I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I _want_ to.”

“Look, you said you trusted me; let me do this. We’re in, aren’t we?”

“Barely,” Steve hissed.

Tony tapped a finger impatiently on the wheel, brain whirling as he tried to put the pieces together fast. He might not be a heavy-hitter the way Steve or Arthur was, and he might not be a natural sniper and infiltrator the way that Natasha and Clint were, but he was trained to think on his feet, and even if his ops hadn’t been as ‘classified’ as the rest of the team, he’d been damn good at what he’d done, and he knew the bureaucracy of SHIELD inside and out. “Look, he’s going to take you to the cells of the high-profile suspects because everyone knows what you can do. He’s going to handcuff you if you don’t do it yourself – and if you do it yourself, you can make it look legitimate enough that you can get out. You have like twenty seconds. You also have twenty seconds to dramatically wake up and try to attack me with your hands behind your back.”

“ _What._ ”

“Ten seconds.”

There was a snarl from the backseat, and as Tony began to pull the car up into the warehouse, there was a sudden slam of _something_ into his back, knocking him forward into the steering wheel and causing him to jerk the car to the side, clipping the line of parked cars there.

Outside the car, there were shouts, and the sounds of stomping feet, but Tony had to throw the car into park and whip around just as another one of Steve’s booted feet came flying towards his face. Thankfully, this one he ducked – badly; Steve still got his shoulder and slammed him against the wheel, laying on the horn – and he grabbed Steve’s ankle as he fought to breathe against the pressure on his chest.

“Agent Stark!  We need tranqs here, people, let’s move!”

That was Rollins, Tony would recognize that mild, practically-calm-in-all-situations voice anywhere, and then Tony twisted to the side like a snake and darted forward, pressing his fingertip against Steve’s throat, the little piece of wire he had creating a “pinprick” mark on Steve’s throat.

“Bang, you’re out,” he whispered quickly. “Now you’re going to pretend you’re drugged, and I’m putting this wire under your tongue and you will use it to pick your way out, and hopefully you being ‘drugged’ means they won’t throw you in the high-security cell and just the average one. Got it?”

All of that had taken barely thirty seconds; Tony jerked back and for one moment, Steve was staring up at him, teeth clenched around the wire Tony had slipped to those plush lips, and those blue eyes were watching Tony distrustfully. Then Steve closed his eyes, pulling the wire into his mouth with his tongue, and for all intents and purposes went limp.

Tony leaned back, rubbing his knuckles over his chest, and tried to ease the ache in his ribs and lungs.

“Agent Stark!”

“Everything’s fine, Rollins,” Tony said, though his attempted casual drawl was a little put off by the hoarseness of his voice. “I wasn’t expecting him to wake up so soon, but now he’s got a double-dose floating around in his bloodstream. He should be nice and quiet now.”

Rollins came up and glanced in the car’s seat. “Handcuffed his hands behind him?”

“Look at him,” Tony growled, “and then look at me. Do I look like I’m in any condition to do anything more than handcuff him? I haven’t seen a medic and I’m seeing double. He apparently pulled me out of the fire – he says that he _didn’t_ start it, though I highly doubt that, since he apparently was close enough nearby to quote-unquote-rescue me.”

Rollins glanced at Tony – and while Tony was definitely in shape and not at all someone to scoff at, Steve was a veritable mountain. “Using tricks to subdue him, eh? Go with your strengths, I always say. He says he didn’t start that fire? We’ve all been in a bit of a mess, trying to figure out what happened. Days before it happened, someone sent your team to opposite ends of the earth, practically.”

Tony heard the interrogation for what it was, but he closed his eyes and curled his shoulders to make himself look smaller – a skill that fooled a great many people that it probably shouldn’t. Being the son of a rich person meant people automatically assumed he got his position because of his connections, not through merit, and being CIA meant he was underestimated twice over. Rubbing a hand over his beard, he let his voice go a little dead and empty. “I was given a mission – we were trying to ferret out some organization called Ten Rings. It seemed – it seemed false, honestly, but I sent half the team to check out the supposed ‘terrorist attack’ site, and the others to play tourist in supposed ‘Ten Ring territory’ to see if anything pops up. I had been assigned that project last minute, and had been working on a lot of other shit and I just – I sent them. I know I shouldn’t have emptied out my team, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of opportunity to make a better choice than what I had on hand. Which, in hindsight, looks fucking suspicious, I get that, but hell if I knew what to do. I’m glad they weren’t in the building when it blew. As it was…” he let his voice trail off, let it waver, and swallowed noticeably. “As it was, I know – I know Rhodes was in the building when it… Is there, there a… a survivor list?”

He opened his eyes, looking at Rollins with all the desperation he could muster – which didn’t need to be faked, honestly, considering that Rhodes and Keener and Parker _had_ been in the building when it crumbled to ash, and Steve couldn’t tell him shit about them – just that he had been coming to warn Tony when the building blew, and had pulled them both clear from the rubble and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

“No official list, yet. It’s barely been a day and a half since it happened, and SHIELD’s been trying to figure out if it was a direct attack on America, on SHIELD, or on any one of the joint task forces that had used that building as home base. I was hoping _you_ could shed some light on that subject, frankly.” Rollins motioned to three average grunts, and without speaking pointed at Steve’s limp frame. “Put this man in a cell, please. He’ll be out a while longer – about six hours from now, notify me and we’ll move him to an interrogation room.”

The three scurried around, dragging Steve’s limp form from the car.

“Ropes _and_ handcuffs?” Rollins asked as they located a stretcher and dumped Steve onto it.

Tony shrugged one shoulder. “This isn’t the first time he woke up before he was supposed to. Those doses are supposed to last twelve hours, but I don’t know if it’s his fucking muscle mass, if it’s his fucking tolerance, or if he’s just that stubborn, but he’s woken up once before and nearly got out of the ropes. I handcuffed him after I got him down that time.”

“Hmm,” Rollins murmured, watching them cart Steve away, and then squinted at Tony. “And he pulled you out because…?”

“I told you, I thought?” Tony said, deliberately letting his voice waver. “I’m – I thought I mentioned that Steve thought we had a mole on the team. I said he told me he didn’t set the explosion, or start the fire, right?”

“You did mention that,” Rollins said.

Tony winced as he shifted to exit the car – he was twisted up because of his small ‘tussle’ with Steve – and leaned on the car after he got out. “Yeah, he said – he wanted me to trust him. After he left, he wanted me to, I dunno. I knew this site was in Phoenix, and that it was the closest SHIELD facility. I brought him here.”

“Well, let’s get you to medical and I’ll debrief you afterwards. And you’re in luck – with the hubbub in San Jose, Director Pierce himself is on his way, and he’ll be stopping here shortly. He’ll definitely want to have words with Steve Rogers and his involvement in the bombing.”

The information… didn’t make any sense. While, yes, a SHIELD office blowing up is a problem, especially considering that Assistant Director Fury may be missing in action, or killed, the person who should come out and check on the situation was not Director Pierce, but Assistant Director Danvers.

The whole thing was smelling more and more fishy the longer Tony thought about it.

“Once I’m done with medical, I’ll come see you,” Tony said, thinking about the normal layout of SHIELD sites. He’d never personally been on blacksites before, but he figured it wasn’t that different from most other bases – there would need to be some level of familiarity of layout, he figured.

In any case, as he was led away to medical, he kept careful note of everything he could – the cameras, the places where people were obviously keeping watch as security instead of simply passing by or running patrols. He kept careful eye on the uniform, the protocols, where badges were kept – or not kept – where weapons hung, how heavily armed the people were in casual scenarios.

The server room would be in the center, he knew that – there wouldn’t be high security in the actual room, since it was expected any infiltrator would have to move through all the corridors, but there would still most likely be at least one camera if not more. He’d have to disable it – and have something else as a big enough distraction so that they wouldn’t notice a camera going down in the server room.

Steve was pretty good at making distractions.

 

It wasn’t hard to distract the medics – they didn’t have to worry about people trying to break _out_ of their clutches, though if this had been the medics back at the San Jose headquarters they would have been more vigilant (none of the task force had liked staying in medical an iota longer than they had to). In any case, he had managed to palm some key materials, he just had to move as fast as he possibly could, in the least amount of moves as he possibly could.

The first stop was a computer behind a nurse’s desk, where he didn’t have time for finesse – he simply threw the most virulent worm he could think of under the time constraints into the system. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to track the origin of the virus currently causing the cascading failure, but it would be bad enough to throw the cameras and any network-connected electronic into a failure for at least five minutes.

With that done, Tony waited only ten seconds, waiting for the cameras to go dark, and then he made his way down the corridor as people realized their electronics were fritzing and refusing to connect to the network. In the quiet panic, he strode down the corridor, garnering a few looks. They would remember it was him, but for right now it wasn’t something he could fix. Instead, he slowed his walk, timed it as best he could to pass in front of the quartermaster’s door when everyone else had just finished turning the corner. It wasn’t perfect, but he still had time to duck in and then quickly grab a uniform – soiled a little, because people don’t count the dirty laundry if it was still sitting in the piles – and picked out a uniform that would fit Steve. There wasn’t much he could do for his shoes, but hopefully it wouldn’t be too noticeable at his next stop.

He walked into the armory.

 

He walked into Steve’s cell and dumped the uniform, handgun, a close enough approximation to a badge, and enough ammunition to keep Steve’s impulsive ass happy.

“Thought you had forgotten me,” Steve muttered, stripping out of his pants and pulling up the uniform pants Tony had gotten. “Almost perfect fit, just a little short in the leg.”

“Yeah, you haven’t been gone long enough for me to forget that shit. And you’re freakishly tall, and you know it.”

Steve chuckled, moving with streamlined efficiency. Tony deliberately did not turn and watch him dress – instead, he reviewed his own haul and tools he’d scavenged. “We have only one minute left before they right the damage I did to the cameras. They’ll be prepared for that kind of attack now, and they’ll be looking for me since I’m the newcomer and because we didn’t exactly have a chance to study their threat response time, so I couldn’t exactly perfectly time everything and _anyway_ , we just need to get to that room and now we have like thirty seconds.”

“I’m ready,” Steve said dryly. “I wonder why we didn’t end up on more ops, if you’re this competent.”

“Why we didn’t – look, I’m not even going to touch that, we need to go, _now_.” Tony shoved the weird statement out of his mind as he strode out of the interrogation room and towards the center of the base, passing two aides power-walking as fast as they could around the corner.

Steve was in step with him, and it was almost familiar, how they strode in sync and Steve followed the subtle cues of Tony’s movements to remain with him as Tony counted the last few seconds that his cover had bought them.

“Hey, I just wanna ask, what the hell did you mean ‘if I’m this competent’?”

Dammit, he told himself he wasn’t going to ask.

Steve glanced at him from the side and sighed. “Looking back at it, it sounds wrong, but I meant it in a good way. I always knew you were good at finding patterns and you had a hell of an instinct, but you never went into the field with us, not as I remember at least.”

“I went into field plenty of times, you fucking self-centered _idiot_ ,” Tony snarled under his breath, turning quickly and nabbing the door handle as a uniformed agent stepped out from the central hub. “Get the _hell_ inside.”

Steve stepped in quickly, and Tony followed behind him. As they fell back into step, Steve murmured under his breath, “Yeah, but you never went with _us_. You went to do recon and stuff, you know.”

It was quick work to palm a keycard that had been on top of someone’s files on their desk, and then move towards the server room. He had in his pockets a drive and palm computer as well as a bunch of wires he pulled as quickly as he could, not sure which wire fit the computer and had no time to pick through the pile of wires he found. He just had to hope he had pulled the correct one, or he’d have to jury-rig something which would double the time needed to search through the servers. With a swift, confident movement, he opened the server room door, stepped inside, and let the frosted-door nearly hit Steve in the face as he moved immediately over to the server banks.

There were many different servers of course, but it meant that he had to find the one that would store the type of data Tony was looking for. As he moved through the racks, Steve stationed himself by the door and said, voice echoing a little in the empty-ish room, “I know that you can – anyway, I know you’re competent, I just was curious as to why you never went _with_ us. Which I said, so… I can tell you’re mad, you’re silent, but I don’t know what to do to make that different.”

“Maybe don’t act like I didn’t go out into the field? You guys were the fucking hammer, I was there when you guys needed a chisel. Every time you went out, the paperwork fucking tripled. But yeah, go on about how you wanted _me_ on your missions where it was always shoot first, ask questions _never_ ,” Tony growled as he located the right bank and flipped through the wires until he found the right one. Then he was plugging the palm unit in, flipping through data as quickly as he could type, eyes darting across the screen.

“What’re you looking for?” Steve called out.

Tony didn’t even look up from the tiny screen. “Financial data. There’s no way in hell what happened in San Jose happened without someone getting paid, but of course the data looks perfect, which means there’s something hidden. You have to give me time.”

“We may not have as much time as you might want,” Steve mumbled under his breath. “Think you can speed it up?”

Gritting his teeth, Tony glowered at the screen in his hand. “It’s not magic, I can’t just snap my fingers and find it, I need to look through this and you need to give me the time to do that, you got it?”

Vaguely, Tony was aware of noise outside the room – booted feet, muffled shouts, and he tried to take as many shortcuts as he could manage. He didn’t really have time, but he sacrificed a few seconds to send out a hail Mary.

“ _Tony_ , we don’t really have a lot of _time_ ,” Steve said, voice gaining that tone that Tony _hated_. “You’ve gotta speed it up, babe.”

With a huff, Tony called back in a too-sweet voice, “You don’t get to call me babe after you turned your back on us.”

“I turned my back on the team, not us – _you_ did that,” Steve snapped. “It doesn’t matter – just do the job we need to do. Do you have a brilliant plan to get us out of here? Before they start shooting in here, or wiping the servers?”

“They can’t wipe the servers; I blocked that, at least for the moment,” Tony said distractedly, finally stumbling upon the data he was looking for. With a soft huff of exaltation, Tony rocked back on his heels, grabbing the flash drive he’d stolen and he plugged it into the palm computer and began copying it, all the folders, all the information he could nab from the stored computer and all those hidden files.

“ _Tony_.”

“You know, I’m doing my level best, okay, I can’t make the information download any faster! You’re just going to have to give me the time if you want this information. You want proof that there’s actually skimming going on, that someone was using money to fund personal agendas, you have to let me download those secondary accounts, okay? Just… you know, that’s always your problem, you have no fucking _patience_.”

There was a thud against the door, and Tony’s head jerked up.

“Agent Stark? It looks a lot like perhaps you _and_ Steve Rogers set that bomb that has injured several and killed over two hundred personnel.”

Tony squeezed his eyes shut at Agent Rollins’s voice, and did his best not to think about his interns and the people he had worked with, day in and day out.

“Director Pierce is only thirty minutes out, and I feel it would be best to resolve this problem right here and right now, instead of waiting for him, don’t you feel? Right now, this is – well, it is serious, but it’s not irreversible. We can still fix this.”

“You find Assistant Director Fury yet?” Steve called out. “I’ll talk with him.”

“You know Director Fury disappeared almost a year and a half ago, Mr. Rogers, and we’re not really taking requests. You don’t have an escape route from that room, and whatever you think you can get in to, you have no way of recording and holding, so let’s stop this farce right here.”

Steve was suddenly at Tony’s shoulder, leaning down, making Tony startle. “What the hell?” Tony hissed.

“Why aren’t they shooting? Why are they talking to us?” Steve asked.

“Probably because all the memory for the West Coast is here in this room? They can’t really afford to lose this closed-in network, because whatever they have as hard copy back-up, it most likely isn’t super recent, and with their back-up site San Jose a smoking crater…”

Steve looked back towards the front of the room, and then looked up at the vents.

“Hell no,” Tony grumbled. “All they need to do is turn on the security system and cut us into pieces. We’ll head out that front door.” Raising his voice, he called out, “I’d like to say that this is just a misunderstanding, Agent Rollins, but I gotta say, some of this financial evidence is pretty damning. Perhaps you ought to call Assistant Director Danvers, get her on the line. We’ll surrender ourselves to her custody, if you want. But I’m not going anywhere until I’ve got Director Pierce here in front of me, and a roomful of witnesses.”

There was silence for a long moment, enough time for Steve to grab Tony’s elbow. “I don’t know this Danvers. They know where Fury is, they knew what he was researching and they locked him up.”

“Look, _I_ know this Danvers, and she’s a real straight-shooter, unlikely to be up to her ears in this mess the way that _Rollins_ is,” Tony hissed back. “She’s fine. And until we figure out exactly where Fury went to – and, again, there’s _no proof_ he’s locked up in a blacksite like this anywhere – she’s our best bet.”

From outside, Agent Rollins called out, “Assistant Director Danvers is on the East Coast, Stark, and you know that. There’s not much we can do to accommodate such a request. We might as well wait for Director Pierce—”

“Yeah, no, see, I think I know what you’re trying to do, and let me tell you, Director Pierce might be on his way here, but Assistant Director Danvers is traveling _with_ him to figure out what the hell is going on out here, and if she needs to be transferred here while her Lieutenant Colonel holds onto control until everything’s set to rights. And I know _that_ because I’ve been finding some very interesting secrets in these finances, Jackie. You may want me to stop right here and sit tight while we wait for the two of them to make it on site, hmm?”

Again, no noise at all, and Steve shoved Tony, nearly knocking him into the huge stacked servers. “Are you a moron, or what?”

“What the hell?” Tony asked, pulling back as the drive beeped at him. Full. He had to hope there was enough on there to prove them right, to protect them from the certain wrath Pierce was about to rain on their heads—

“You _always_ do that, you always taunt someone bigger than you and end up getting your ass kicked, it’s _not safe_ —”

“Hey, excuse you, who found _whose_ pictures of a skinny, loud-mouthed recruit unable to drop a fight?” Tony snapped back, stepping away, and stuffed the palm computer into his pocket, popped off another hail Mary and hoped against hope that they didn’t cut the network access he’d already located and piggy-backed on. They’d need their own network to stay up, he hoped, but if they were smart they would lock it down, wait until the Director Pierce and the Assistant Director Danvers showed up.

He could hope.

He just needed to—

“You never took criticism well. Never,” Steve growled.

“Excuse you?” Tony said, jerking his face away from the server he was inspecting, pinning Steve with a look.

Steve shrugged helplessly. “You never listened to me. You always fought with me, and you tried to change everything to be your way, and you definitely didn’t think things through with the team after I left.”

“And I suppose, what, Natasha decided to tattle on me? After you left, you _left_ , and I was stuck here, and I had to compare to you in _everything_ , and everyone knew that I wasn’t you.” Tony folded his arms, glowering at Steve, and Steve stared at him in confusion.

“No one said you had to be me, you just had to _not_ fuck up. Commanders change all the time, but you tried too much to be like me, and it just doesn’t work for you!”

“Well, what did you expect me to do?!” Tony snarled back, angry and hurt that Natasha apparently had hated his leadership style enough to complain to _Steve_. “You were _gone_ , Steve! You were fucking _gone_ and I had to handle it on my own, and _I did_!”

For a moment, Steve looked like he was going to continue arguing, but then his eyes shuttered, and he looked down and away. “You wouldn’t believe me. I kept telling you that there was something rotten in the center of SHIELD and you didn’t believe me.”

“Is _that_ what you think?” Tony said incredulously. “That I didn’t _believe_ you?”

“Well, what the hell was I supposed to think?” Steve growled, folding his arms.

“You were supposed to _fucking trust me_!” Tony shouted, shoving back. “We were a fucking couple, and you never _trusted_ me!”

Steve stared at him in shock, which is when there was noise from the front of the room.

“Mr. Rogers, Agent Stark. I must say, I’m disappointed in what I’m hearing, here.”

Shocked out of his anger and hurt, Tony jerked his head to the door. “That’s a hell of a lot faster than thirty minutes out. What the hell.”

“Rollins must have contacted him as soon as we were both on base, because I left to search for the rat like Fury was doing,” Steve muttered. “What’s the play?”

Tony shook his head. “I need Danvers to be there. She won’t let this derail, she won’t – we just need to wait for her. They’re not going to shoot us, but if they gas us, or just rush the doors, we’re sunk.”

For a long moment, Steve stared Tony down. “You trust her?”

“Yeah, I trust her,” Tony said, getting incensed. “You don’t trust my word now, either?”

“And you really did trust me? You were looking into it?” Steve said, and his voice was… funny. Enough of a weird tone to it that Tony, who had been gearing up to shout at him again, stuttered to a stop and tilted his head at Steve.

“I did. I do. I was looking, Steve, I swear. I know you think I – I know you think I didn’t listen, I wasn’t looking, but I _was_. You know how I know Fury’s not being held by any of these blacksites? I _fucking looked_ , Steve. I’ve been looking, since he disappeared, I’ve been looking, and you didn’t trust _me._ ”

Steve nodded sharply. “Right.”

With that, he turned on his heel and stomped out the door.

Tony’s mouth dropped open in shock.

“I don’t see AD Danvers. I thought she was traveling with you, Director. What happened?”

Steve’s voice was deliberately loud, and Tony began frantically looking for something, some backup, something that could help.

“Mr. Rogers, of the two in that room, I did not expect you to walk out just from being asked nicely,” came Director Pierce’s voice. “Where is your accomplice in this matter?”

“Of the two of us, I’m more expendable,” Steve said, and though it _sounded_ like it might be a joke – it might not be, and Tony nearly ran out there right then and there to keep Steve as safe as he could… but he had nothing to keep him safe with, just watching the palm computer, hoping against hope that it was only that Danvers had been shown to a different point on the base but was still physically present. They weren’t going to get out of that room alive, not with the knowledge that Tony had implied they already knew. Which, to be fair, only Tony knew in full, but they didn’t know that.

There was that ingratiating and horrific laugh that Tony had always thought was annoying, but now hated entirely, and then Pierce said, “I wouldn’t agree with that, but then again, your loyalty and determination to get in the way has been the problem ever since you were chosen for this task force and put in Fury’s orbit.”

“Sorry, I was a little diverted, but I’m here now.”

Even Tony could hear that she was out of breath, though her voice was still as even as could be expected.

With Danvers there, he came out, all smiles and quick talk, saying, “Oh, I recognize that voice, and I can’t just not greet my dear, dear friend, Carol Danvers, flying ace who can keep up with my Rhodey, now, can I?”

As he approached, he watched the guards around the perimeter lift their guns and point them at him, but he kept his hands in clear view, pressing a kiss to her lips – and transferring the flash drive from his cheek to hers as quickly and succinctly as he could. “For you, my dear, I will gladly surrender and let you lock me up in one of those cells – you’re probably going to put the two of us in different ones, probably the glass cells you use for the _really_ dangerous ones, huh?”

She wasn’t as skilled at hiding things in weird places, but it took her only a moment before she shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know what game you’re up to, Stark, but we’re getting to the bottom of this.”

 

When the cell door opened, Tony twisted his head to look – he’d splayed himself out on the floor, staring up blankly at the darkened ceiling.

It was Steve, standing there.

“You contacted Danvers, didn’t you?”

“Once I found out she was in Pierce’s convoy, yeah. I insinuated she needed to be wherever Pierce was.”

“Did you contact Wilson, too?”

Tony twitched one shoulder as if to shrug. “Once I got that computer, I was contacting as many people as I could find. Contacted Keener and Parker, too, and Barton. Couldn’t find Romanoff’s GPS signal, and I think the others were too far out of reach halfway around the world for this tiny little network and tiny little satellite. I did my best.”

“Your best was a hell of a lot better than mine,” Steve said softly.

Tony clicked his tongue and looked back up at the ceiling. “Well. I had half of it complete before the bomb. And while the bomb certainly sped up everything, and caused us to commit criminal trespassing and a slew of felonies I don’t want to think about, it still got resolved, so. There we go.”

“There we go,” Steve echoed, and there was a shifting noise, as if Steve was sitting on the ground with Tony. Then Steve said quietly, “They’re asking me to come back to the team.”

“Of course they are,” Tony replied, trying hard not to sound bitter. “I’m not exactly team leader material.”

There was another long moment of silence, and then Steve murmured, “I said I’d come back – as your SiC.”

“As my—” The words penetrated Tony’s practiced and determined casual demeanor, and he popped up to look at Steve.

Steve was sitting cross-legged, nearby the door, and his gaze was serious and a little fond.

Clearing his throat, Tony licked his lips and pointed at Steve almost accusingly. “You are coming back… as my second in command? Why?”

“Because while I knew what needed to be done, I had no actionable plan. I had nothing. If you had not come… I don’t know what I would’ve done. My plan was… a lot more straightforward. Just, you know. Forcing our way in.”

“Us two? Alone?” Tony interjected, raising an eyebrow.

Steve spoke loudly, ignoring Tony’s objections, “And then just fighting our way to the server room. Getting the material we needed, and getting out.”

“Again, _us two_? _Alone_? Were you even _thinking_?”

Huffing out a chuckle, Steve shook his head. “And that’s the thing. The SiC shouldn’t be thinking up how to make plans make sense so often. So, you know… if you’d have me back?”

Tony stared at him a long moment, and then threw himself at Steve.

“Yes. A hundred times over,” Tony whispered fervently, “ _yes_.”

**Author's Note:**

> In my mind, as I was focused more on the 'solving the government conspiracy' bit and didn't get around to it, this is the accident that causes Rhodey to be paralyzed, but Peter and Harley had been out getting coffee for Bruce (who, like Tony, had been far enough that all he suffered was bruises and abrasions and a broken wrist, nothing else) and so those two weren't in the blast BECAUSE I DON'T KILL OFF TEENAGED CHARACTERS, UNLIKE SOME DIRECTORS.


End file.
